Belmont chronicle. [volume] (St. Clairsville, Ohio) 1855-1973, 1887-06-16
The Party Of Fraud at Large.

variegated and moderated by fits of
earnestness that are quite too awful.
We are pleased to see that since Sher.
mans Springfield speech the G. j, has
dropped its airy manner and affectation
of playfulness, and is going for Sherman
with all its agonies.
1t accuses him. with some show of
truth, of the Hayes administration, and
we may remark that the time will come
when the dignity aud wisdom of Hayes
will be seen to have made a chapter of
highly honorable and indisputably i'm
portant history.
The Courier Journal says:
There is no longer any doubt in the
minds of honest men that Mr.. Tilden
was elected President in 1876"
The time has come when honest men
have no reason to doubt and no excuse
to deny, that the only shadow thrown
upon the fair election of Hayes Was by
Democratic campaigns Of assassination
in states that under the law aud the con-
stitution should have been unquestiona-
bly, Republican. There would have been
no controversy about the election of
Hayes il the confederates had discharg'
ed the obligations that they took when
their lost rights as citizens of the United
fafa hn 70
restored to them. The condition was
that the black man was to have the bali
lot. That did not mean that the voting
power of the whites of the confederate
States should be increased, and that the
citizens emaneipated by the war, by the
overthrow and surrender of the south
ern armies, should be enslsved political
ly by bands of assassins who under the
higher law of the shedding of blood
should establish reign of terror and
call it peace.
The election machinery of the south
ern states that the Republicans controll
ed was adjusted so as to provide reme-
dy for the crying evil of the section
that was the association of violence with
politics. The Returning Boards, about
which there has been so much ignorant
and mendacious imputation, had, among
OF her duties, to see that voters were not
and If they we're, that the
did not gain by terrorizing
1t was perfectly proper con-
trivance, one that grew out of the cir
of the case. The policy
was to protect the innocent and the
helpless from murder as a political In
huence. The encouragement of mur-
der always seems to the Democrats to
be a great and dreadful outrage. If they
could not kill people in the disputed
southern states for voting in oppositlon
to the confederate Democratic ticket,
what was the use of being in the union
at all? The Democratic out-cry that
Hayes was not elected is, and has been
for more than ten years,the howl of the
wolf that the sheep muddied the water;
and the enunciation of the great princi+
pie that the wolf has right, owing to
the superiority of his coarse hair over
wool, to bite sheep in the neck and lap
their blood.
The Democratic party in 1875 demand
ed as the great and only principle Uf the
party that murder should be recognized.
They had killed many thousand of abso-
Iutely innocent men for the express pur-
pose of electiDg Democratic President.
They wanted the harvest of the bloody
seedtime. They shrieked for the usur
fruct of murder. Their hunger and
thirst, that Mr.. Curtis recognized just
before he became baker of bread and
A bearer of drink to the Democracy, was
fer0cious and huge.
1t was the same spirit that knocked
down Charles Sumner in the senate,
fred on the famishing garrison il Fort
Sumter to make sure of the war, and or
ganized assassination on the dead line
at Andersonville.
But the last conservative influence In
behalf of the new south that was hoped
for, after the war, in the politics of the
section. was exhausted in the prevention
through Returning Boards of the Carry
ing of three southern states.
The business of the Boards was to
show fair play to poor men and to sus
tain the legitimate construction of the
constitution of the United
States. There were motives of humani-
ty that were influential. There has
been no civilized country on the face of
The earth in a thousand years, in which
there has been as much innocent blood
shed by organized massacre for political
purposes, as that in the conquered states
Of the southern confederacy during the
of General Grant. When
he left the Presidential chair hes left a
consolidated south, cemented in blood,
and it has been solid ever since.
There has been no impertinence out
side the internal regions equal to the in
the Democratic partisans
have put upon this chapter of their
horrible history.
The man who was enthusiastically elect
ed President of the United States by
bloody fraud, is Grover Cleveland. He
had the solid south. There was not
colored Republican, or a consistent
friend of the United States, allowed
from the Rio Grsnde to the Potomac, to
cast vote that had any influence In
the Presidential election. 1t was the
greatest exhibition of the deprsvity of
iespotism under Democratic forms ever
seen in the pretended exercise of the
highest sovereignty by an alleged free
people.
Add to the solid south the overflow
Of the city of New York into Connecti.